Power Wars Blog by Charlie Savage

A few weeks ago, the website of The American Conservative magazine published a lengthy article by its brief-tenured and outgoing editor, Robert W. Merry, carrying the sober and understated headline “The Nunes Memo and the Death of American Journalism.” Why was journalism dead? Because of me! More specifically, because when the famous memo prepared at

A bipartisan group of 10 senators today sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell today urging him not to try to attach an extension of the expiring warrantless surveillance program law, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, to some other must-pass bill and trying to jam it through without debate. If there

When President Trump signed the fiscal year 2018 iteration of the annual National Defense Authorization Act this week, he appended a signing statement challenging several dozen of its provisions. Obviously he didn’t write the signing statement himself, but his legal team – spanning the Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of the White House Counsel,

The White House last night sent its semi-annual War Powers Resolution letter to Congress disclosing deployments of U.S. troops “equipped for combat” (a sometimes ambiguous category – guards at Guantanamo count, but not troops along the DMZ in the Korean Peninsula). I compared it to the June 2017 letter and identified the following deltas: The

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has provided some written answers to questions submitted by senators like Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, and Angus King during Senate Intel hearings over the summer about the FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance program. Some of this is well covered territory, like Wyden’s fighting with the

The law that supports the NSA/FBI warrantless surveillance program, the FISA Amendments Act Section 702, is set to expire on December 31, 2017, if Congress does not act to extend it. There are a proliferating array of rival bills to do so, some with modest reforms, some with sweeping reforms, and some with scant or

This is the draft manager’s amendment to H.R. 3989, the “USA Liberty Act,” which would extend the expiring FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance law but impose some changes to it, and which is being pushed by bipartisan leadership in the House Judiciary Committee. It’s been circulating for several days. Among other things, it

Today the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is marking up, in secret, Chairman Burr’s bill to extend the FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance program, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act. While the bill is not yet public, I published a copy here yesterday, alongside a revised draft of the Goodlatte-Conyers House Judiciary Committee bill,

Lots of legislative action on FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance is happening with drafts that are not public even though they are not classifed. Here are some. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 24, 2017, will mark up – behind closed doors – a bill being pushed by its chairman, Senator

The National Security Agency has declassified a third (and final) tranche of previously unreleased documents from the docket of a then-secret 2011 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court case over upstream Internet surveillance conducted under the FISA Amendments Act/702 program. Here are the first and second tranches. This third tranche is long a dense – nearly 350 pages – but

Power Wars provides “a master class in how to think seriously about crucial aspects of the [war on terrorism]. … comprehensive, authoritative … essential and enthralling.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Already classic…there is no other work quite like it.”

—The Jerusalem Post

Power Wars explores “in intricate detail nearly every major issue in Obama’s national security policy: detainees, military commissions, torture, surveillance, secrecy, targeted killings, and war powers. Its behind-the-scenes story will likely stand as the definitive record of Obama’s approach to law and national security.”